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Film and TV have always been a part of Tre’vell Anderson’s journey.
The Black trans nonbinary entertainment journalist grew up watching Tyler Perry’s Madea movies and Jamie Foxx’s Wanda character on the sketch show In Living Color. They remember, even amid the onscreen stereotypes and caricatures of their youth, finding moments of validation in their identity. And, for the last decade, they’ve been covering a rise in more authentic forms of representation for outlets like the Los Angeles Times, Out magazine, and more.
In their debut book, We See Each Other: A Black, Trans Journey Through Film and TV, Anderson chronicles that history through a personalized lens and, as they put it, “in a non-comprehensive order.” Tying together topics such as the representation of drag in media, Laverne Cox’s pathmaking influence on Hollywood, and the proliferation of LGBTQ+ shows like Pose, the book is Tre’vell at their most authentic and unapologetic. Part memoir and part history, We See Each Other covers everything from Psycho to Tangerine with a keen eye.
Below, Anderson speaks with Them about their writing process, moving the needle for Black trans people in Hollywood, and how they kept themselves motivated for the near decade they spent working on the book.
Since you first had the idea for the book in 2015, what iterations of the storytelling format did you play with before you just said, “Wait, I’m just gonna frame this around me and my coming into the world?”
The [initial] vision for the book was a more clinical approach to trans history and images of gender-expansive folks on screen. That’s what I needed to do to sell a book idea, right? It felt like I needed to do something straightforward, documenting this history, and teasing out some of what [the Netflix documentary] Disclosure gave us. I sold that idea, and they bought it, praise the Lord.
Then in the course of writing the book, it became essential to demonstrate the importance of visibility while also teasing out the paradox of that visibility, particularly for trans folks who are also Black. This was also in the midst of anti-trans legislation and anti-LGBTQ legislation, and anti-Black legislation. Over the last decade, we have experienced the most visibility we’ve ever had as a community. But [we’ve] also [seen], every year for the last three, four, five years that it's been documented, the killings of trans people at the same time. It’s been Black trans women and femmes at the top of that list. It felt important to wrestle with that reality and to also do it from my own lived experience as somebody who’s been covering this over the last decade or so.
It turned into a more personal journey and experience because it felt like the truth of my own personal reality was essential to articulate at the same time as this history.
What was it like to bring back those honest truths about your youth while making parallels to what we had in the Black culture coming up? I love the discussion of how Tyler Perry movies were solidifying for you but also perpetuated all these Black woman stereotypes.
Even before I sold the book, I knew from the beginning that I wanted it to be unapologetically Black. For me, that meant, one, writing it in my voice, how I talk, right? That was important to me in terms of the digestibility of the book, in terms of who I speak to in my writing and my own personal lived experience in becoming a nonbinary person who identifies as trans and uses that language for myself.
I wanted to be sure to bring in bits and pieces of conversation about how gender expansiveness showed up in my own life. So before I had language to articulate my transness and nonbinary-ness, my community was talking about Madea, Rasputia, or Wanda — all of these characters [who] were portrayed by Black, straight men as a means of comedic value. They always talked about how these characters were supposed to be representations and homages to Black women we knew in our communities. Fast forward so many years, as I’m now moving through the world, and I begin to hear the exact same jokes that are thrown at Madea, the exact same jokes that are thrown at Wanda, lodged at me and lodged at other Black trans women and femmes.
It felt important to, at a minimum, to interrogate some of these images that we, as Black folks, love. We ride. We love Wanda. Jamie Foxx in In Living Color. Many of us loved Tyler Perry as Madea, but not everybody.
How did you decide what each chapter was going to tackle — this one is gonna be about Disclosure, this one is gonna be about Laverne Cox — and the frames for those chapters?
One of the things I did was I bought all these Post-it Notes, and I put a timeline on my literal wall in my room. There was one level in one color of Post-it Notes that was just, like, dates since the beginning of moving images. There was another level under the dates of these important canonical moments in the visibility of our community that I have to discuss, right? At least, I thought I had to discuss it. So that was Boys Don’t Cry; that was Laverne Cox on Orange is the New Black and “The Transgender Tipping Point.” That was Caitlyn Jenner coming out on the cover of Vanity Fair. These are the moments that I know personally.
From there, what I tried to do was do a loose chronology for the entire book. So if you make your way through the entire book, and I hope people do, it is a loose chronology from, from before moving images to this current moment that we are in. But I also wanted to be clear that it wasn’t going to be comprehensive. I wasn’t going to hit on everything. I wasn’t interested in revisiting a lot of tragic narratives, but also a lot of the things that we would deem to be canonical portrayals of transness or gender expansiveness on screen — it’s a whole lot of white people.
You’ve done so much in your journalism career thus far. When writing the book, what made you say, “OK, I'm gonna source myself?”
I made the decision that I was going to center the book on my unique perspective as a nonbinary trans journalist who has covered the last decade of this conversation. I was like, “Absolutely. I'm gonna cite myself.” Why? Because I've been doing the work. But also, to be quite honest with you, at the earliest moments in my career when I was covering diversity in Hollywood, particularly Black film, there weren't a lot of other Black folks doing it, period. Definitely not doing it at a mainstream legacy institution. Oftentimes we see an outlet like the Los Angeles Times, like the New York Times, as the start of the archives. When the fact of the matter is, when you go to the archives of the Los Angeles Times, and you look up coverage of trans people in Hollywood, [and] coverage of trans people in culture more broadly speaking, a lot of my [work] is gonna come up. So part of it was about me claiming my space as somebody who’s been doing this particular work.
The other part of it was about making a comment on our industry writ large. I was very intentional about making sure that, yes, you gonna see a lot “Anderson, Tre’vell” in the quoted sources. Still, you’re also going to see other folks who have been doing this work alongside me, who’ve also been commenting on this, and trans folks especially. It’s a collection of us who’s been doing this stuff over the last decade that was important for me to pull on. You’re also gonna get Trish Bendix, Oliver Whitney, and Monica Roberts all reporting. I was leaning on as many trans, first and foremost, but also writers, journalists, storytellers, actors, and actresses in crafting what the book is and what it would become. We can reassert the fact that we, as trans people, are experts in our own stories and in our own histories as well.
How did you compile the viewing guide of different shows and movies?
The viewing guides really were an attempt to pull people into doing their own research and their own education beyond the book. I’m a visual learner more so than anything. And so I asked myself, “What would it look like to read a chapter about how drag has shown up on screen and its intersections with transness, and then direct someone to watch Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil?” [You can] see what I see, but then also see what you see and move forward from there, right? So that’s where the idea for the viewing guides came from.
There are [also] YouTube videos in there, there are podcasts in there, there are a variety of things mainly because I oftentimes think we, as trans people end up doing a lot of education, and it’s a necessary evil to a point. But I want it to be clear that this is like an appetizer. It’s supposed to wet your whistle, right? It is; it is meant to. I love hearing people say that, like, “Ooh, I was reading your book, and I found myself Googling many things.” Great. Do the work yourself because sometimes I ain't explaining because I'm tired of explaining.
For the past few years, you've been writing the book; what kept you motivated to keep writing, especially amid all the depressing news?
What kept me going was I found it remarkably motivating to know that I belong to this long line of, I call it, trans bad bitchery. This long line of trans bad bitchery existed before this time and had thriving lives beyond their identities: Ajita Wilson’s name and her import and the fact that this was a Black trans woman who was a Jet [magazine] “Beauty of the Week” back in the day. For us Black folks, Jet Beauty, that’s a lot. It’s also enlivening for me to know that one of our trailblazers, Sandra Caldwell, who played Drinka Champane in the Cheetah Girls, one of my favorite, probably my favorite Disney Channel original movie, is still walking with us today.
The thing that kept me doing the book, and working through it, was wanting to share some of that information with others in hopes that it would also have a similar effect on them. Knowing that there is a long history that even predates moving images for us — knowing that information allows people to continue going a little longer, to hold on a little tighter, even as we are navigating this particular moment of foolishness.
This conversation has been condensed and edited.
We See Each Other: A Black, Trans Journey Through Film and TV is available now from Andscape Books.
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